I have a min-max player in my group who gave himself like 5 guns. Each has the appropriate back story and all but I'm anticipating that in the middle of a tough gun fight he'll start switching guns to get more dice. Is that legal?

Peter

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Peter AdkisonOwner/CEO, Gen Con LLCThe best four days in gaming!www.gencon.com

I am far from an expert on the rules, but my understanding, perfectly legal. To use them all in a gun fight, it would have to make narrative sense however: maybe he exhausts bullets in one and has to drop it and pull another, or maybe he'll "take a blow" where the gun falls from his grip. Remember that he's going to be going obviously armed in all situations: that's going to have a big impact on the way people treat him.

Vincent himself tends to point out that having all those guns is going to make it awfully tempting for that player to pull out one of them in any confrontation, so give him plenty of situations where it's a tough decision to do so. Just as it's perfectly legal for him to carry five guns, it's perfectly legal for you to suggest a confrontation where the stakes are "Does your Dog get shot?" and then pull a "Wako Kid" on him: link

Vincent has said before that he loves it when his players have lots of big items, especially guns. Lots of temptation to pull them out and use them.

Dogs isn't about winning or losing, it's about deciding how far you are willing to go to get what you want. If you put him up against a little old lady, or his brother, and he's willing to use the guns? That's pretty intense, and therefore pretty awesome.

I don't even think of it as a problem to be fixed. Here's a guy who carries a bunch of guns, right? That's fine. Have your NPCs respond to him as they would to a guy who carries a bunch of guns -- some scared, some fascinated, some indifferent, some contemptuous -- not to make a point or teach a lesson, just to incorporate it into the world. No reason for you not to embrace it.

Sooner or later, and you don't have to hurry to this or try to arrange it artificially, that player's going to come up against a problem that he doesn't want to use his guns to solve. (A scared-eyed 15-year-old girl might be just the one.) If he's been smart as a player, he'll have arranged his dice otherwise so that he has some options left, which is fine; if he hasn't, he'll be stuck and he'll have to make a hard call, which is also fine. Or maybe he'll never come up against such a problem, maybe he'll always be ready and willing to shoot someone; that's fine too, and interesting. Really? Always?

Now, this is supposing that the player wants to play the game, of course. It's possible that taking five guns is his way of telling you that he doesn't want to play, in which case it doesn't matter how legal it is. I have no reason to think that this is the case for this player, but I have seen it once or twice.

Also the remember that any use of those guns' dice is subject to the "most discriminating player at the table" rule. If it's not convincing, don't let him roll those dice. Sometimes there's a significant impact to having many guns, sometimes it's not any different from having just one.

But in some ways, having five guns is not all that different from having a 5d6 Gun. And that's just saying something about how much he might be tempted to shoot people.